Citizens Favor Democratic, Culturally Similar Partners for Trade Deals — Not Size

Why This Question Matters

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) are the fastest-growing form of trade liberalization and, unlike multilateral bodies, allow countries to pick and privilege specific partners. That selectivity helps explain PTA proliferation but raises an important puzzle: which kinds of countries do citizens want their governments to partner with? Gabriele Spilker, Thomas Bernauer, and Víctor Umaña probe this question in three developing countries to shed light on how public preferences might shape international trade policy.

Where and How the Study Was Done

The authors embedded conjoint experiments in nationally administered surveys in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Vietnam to capture how citizens evaluate potential PTA partners across multiple attributes at once. Conjoint experiments present respondents with paired hypothetical countries that vary on dimensions such as political regime, cultural similarity, environmental and labor standards, economic size, and geographic distance—allowing the researchers to estimate which traits drive support for partnership.

What the Authors Tested

• A multidimensional theoretical framework predicting that partner choice reflects normative, economic, and cultural considerations.
• Whether preferences are consistent across three very different developing-country contexts.

Key Findings

• Across Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Vietnam, respondents consistently prefer potential partners that are culturally similar, democracies, and that maintain high environmental and labor standards.
• Economic size and geographic proximity matter much less than might be expected: bigger economies and closer neighbors did not systematically attract greater support as PTA partners.
• Patterns hold despite the three countries’ divergent political and economic contexts, suggesting broad-based citizen-level criteria for partner selection.

Why This Matters for Trade Policy and Scholarship

These results imply that public opinion in developing countries emphasizes political and social compatibility—democracy, cultural affinity, and regulatory standards—over pure economic calculus when judging trade partners. That has implications for how governments justify PTA choices at home and how scholars think about the domestic determinants of international cooperation. The findings also underscore the usefulness of conjoint experiments for unpacking complex trade preferences in diverse contexts.

Next Questions

Future research could explore how elite messaging, media coverage, or concrete economic stakes (e.g., jobs in specific sectors) interact with these baseline preferences to shape real-world PTA negotiations and ratification politics.